13 Blog KPIs You Should Be Tracking
Digital Marketing | 5 min read
How to Navigate Ecommerce Seasonality
Digital Marketing | 3 min read
The best way to remember the gist of digital performance marketing is that it’s an online advertising strategy wherein you pay based on the performance of marketing efforts. In that sense, performance marketing is highly focused on results.
This blog will delve more into the nuances and scope of performance marketing, but before we proceed, it is important to understand that performance marketing falls within the broad umbrella of digital marketing.
Digital marketing has various pillars including digital advertising, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and more. These pillars never operate in a silo but typically synergize together, and performance marketing can be implemented through all the examples of the digital marketing pillars we mentioned above.
Ready to learn more about performance marketing? Great! Many businesses love performance marketing and so do we – that’s why we’ve put together this comprehensive guide to help you get a better understanding of:
Let’s get started!
Digital performance marketing is an online marketing strategy that is centred on results. Businesses who opt to do performance marketing, on any channel where it is available, will only pay based on how the online ad performs. So the key focus here is the pricing model of the ads.
However, digital performance marketing is not confined to online ads alone.There are also influencers who take on a pricing model that aligns with how performance marketing works (which we will talk about in another section).
One of the most prevalent problems with traditional marketing, wherein advertising is paid for up front, is that it can be unclear how marketing expenses correlate to ROI. However, if your business leverages performance marketing, you can choose to pay only when your ad or marketing effort generates actions that lead to ROI for your business.
For example, you can opt to only pay for every completed sale or booking. Hence, every penny you spend on performance marketing is well worth it. This is why small businesses and large corporations alike use performance marketing to expand their reach, generate more revenue, and ultimately grow their business.
When utilizing performance marketing, it may be that some potential customers do not click on your ad or go into your sales funnel from that ad. If your chosen pricing model is cost-per-click or cost-per-sale (some of the most common pricing models used in performance marketing), then it means you don’t need to pay for the times your ad was seen but no such actions were taken. In short, you get the bonus of free brand exposure.
A digital performance marketing strategy can be implemented on a number of channels including social media, display ads, and more. Furthermore, there are various marketing goals that you can accomplish with digital performance marketing such as driving more traffic to your website, getting more sign ups to your email list, generating more sales, and more!
Performance marketing is centred on actions. Hence, the pricing models for marketing efforts under performance marketing are as follows:
As the name “cost-per-click” suggests, businesses pay based on how many clicks their online ad has gotten. This is typically selected if the intent is to drive traffic to a site or a landing page. Though an action is associated with this pricing model, it is still somewhat less direct if your intent is to increase sales, gain new leads, boost subscriptions, and so on. For these latter examples, there are other more fitting performance marketing pricing models.
That’s right. Performance marketing allows you to have ads that you only need to pay for if you get a lead from them. Typically, cost-per-lead is chosen when the desired action involves leaving contact details, signing up for a webinar, subscribing to an email newsletter, and so on. Choosing a cost-per-lead pricing model eliminates the chances of paying for accidental clicks.
Choosing the cost-per-action pricing model allows advertisers to pay only for specific actions such as making a purchase, signing up for a service, and so on. Typically cost-per-action is linked to some form of transaction. The main advantage of choosing cost-per-action is that every single ad expense can be linked to revenue. It also eliminates any risk of paying for bad leads.
Display ads can be considered one of the first modalities of digital marketing. Though digital advertising has been around for a while, numerous businesses are still finding success with using display ads in their digital performance marketing campaigns through interactive ad elements, interesting graphics, and/or compelling copy or video.
Display advertising has become somewhat synonymous with Google Ads since this is the most popular online advertising platform. It’s understandable because the Google Display Network (GDN) encompasses more than two million websites, apps, and videos where display ads can be served.
In this modern day and age, many people turn to search engines like Google for answers. This is why search engine marketing is powerful – it allows businesses to reach their customers at that critical point when their customers need them. Typically, a CPC model is used for search engine marketing.
On many social media platforms, achieving massive reach through organic posts is becoming more and more challenging. This is why making use of performance marketing is more necessary than ever.
For performance marketers, social media is an exciting tool because there are numerous options on how to customize ads. Typically, performance marketing on social media can help in increasing website traffic, generating leads, and increasing conversion. There are also various pricing models to choose from.
The key challenge for marketers, however, is finding the right platform(s) that targets their desired audience. Determining the most fitting social media platform(s) is the first crucial step before doing performance marketing on social media.
It may seem that the terms affiliate marketing and performance marketing are interchangeable, but affiliate marketing is only a subset of performance-based marketing.
In affiliate marketing, an advertiser pays an internet publisher (the affiliate) to promote their products/services. Then, each lead or sale from the affiliate is tracked and a commission is paid to the affiliate for every lead or sale.
Influencer marketing has been increasingly showing incredible results year-over-year. Around 67% of marketers believe that influencer marketing helps them to reach a more targeted, yet vast audience. Furthermore, influencer marketing is known to have an ROI that’s 11x higher than that of traditional marketing methods.
Similar to how affiliate marketing works, businesses can also use performance-based influencer marketing to drive maximum results while lowering the risk of wasted budget when using pay-per-post or subscription pricing models. Currently, some (but not all) influencers offer performance marketing pricing models like CPC, CPS, and CPA.
As we’ve covered, there are numerous channels that you can use for performance marketing. However, before everything else, it’s vital to get a clear understanding of what you want performance marketing to achieve for your business. Along with these goals, consider your target audience. Looking into the technological inclinations of your target demographics can be helpful, along with studying the type of messaging that works best with them. What channels are best used to connect with them?
After determining your preferred channels, learn more about the options for performance marketing that are available for you. Different ads on different platforms would have their own formats and requirements for layout, copy, and graphics. Furthermore, budget scopes would also differ for each channel. Looking into average costs for each channel would be a great way to get an idea of such costs.
Though performance marketing on various channels has been a reliable source of success for various businesses, it usually takes fine-tuning through trial and error over time. A series of split tests and optimizations would usually take weeks or many months before you can get solid, actionable data to fuel your insights.
So for you to get quick success with performance marketing, we recommend putting your trust in a team of experienced marketing experts who can take care of everything from strategy to designing graphics, all the way through to execution, and post-ad-campaign data analytics.
If you would like to learn more about what we can do for you, feel free to contact us!
Digital Marketing | 5 min read
Digital Marketing | 3 min read
Stay up to date with the latest marketing, social media tips, guides and news.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us
© 2024 The Influence Agency. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy
Please do not solicit.
No junk mail.
Thank you
For the latest tips, growth hacks, and news in digital marketing
Do you follow an influencer that you absolutely adore and think they deserve to be recognized for all the great work that they do? Click below to nominate your favourite North American influencers for The Influence Awards!
Are you aiming to increase web traffic or grow your social media presence? Figure out why you’re leveraging paid media in the first place and build your strategy from there. Having clearly defined goals in mind will help you focus on your brand’s key priorities.
Designing strategies that cater to all three stages of the buyer journey ensures that you’re maximizing your brand’s reach. Every user at every stage is valuable—and you have to make sure you’re creating paid media content that speaks to each audience type.
Effective paid media is tied to targeting the right keywords. If you’re leveraging paid search ads to appear on SERPs (search engine results pages), then in-depth research is necessary. Bid on the keywords that are most relevant to your business to trigger only the most effective ad appearances.
Gather your team—because it’s time to start coming up with ad copy that wins attention. The key is to resonate with your audience and inspire engagement. Be real. Be relatable. And most importantly, don’t underestimate the power of creativity.
Do the landing pages on your website effectively push visitors further down the sales funnel? If not, you’re letting potential customers slip through your fingers. Optimize each of your landing pages so that they nudge users towards converting.
The options are plenty when it comes to paid advertising, including Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Pinterest among others. Analyze who your target demographic is, research where it’s best to connect with them, and then target the platforms where you wish to build awareness.
If you’re ready to build your paid media ad campaign, you’ll find that it will be further broken down into “ad groups” to ensure more effective pay-per-click advertising. These ad groups house one or more ads that have similar targets or categories. Let’s say your brand’s website features categories such as clothing, shoes, and accessories. Creating ad groups according to keywords that fall under these categories will help the PPC system decide when to show ads for these products.
Retargeting ads are bound to succeed because it’s a second shot at a conversion. Visitors have shown interest in the product/service once before, and sometimes all it takes is a little reminder to push them to the checkout page. So don’t forget to retarget and aim better this time.
In the world of paid media, what works and what doesn’t? You’ll have to run A/B tests to find out! Whether you’re testing which keywords bring more traffic or which social platforms earn more ad engagement, you won’t find out what really works for your brand until you test it.
Revisit your initial goals. Did your efforts bring about the results you expected? Tracking results is an essential step in your brand’s paid advertising campaigns. The data you collect from currently running ads will help lay the foundation for your future campaigns.
After tracking your results, you’ll be able to see where adjustments are necessary. There’s always room for improvement, so keep striving to consistently resonate and build trust with your audience—it’s how to create paid ads that pay off.
213 Sterling Rd. Unit 214 
Call Us:
info@theinfluenceagency.com
